10 Unnecessary Doctor Who Details You Need To Know
3. Big Ben’s On The Mend (The Christmas Invasion)
The destruction of Big Ben (or, to use its proper name, Elizabeth Tower) is one of the most iconic moments in all of revived Who. And yet, by the time of Army of Ghosts and Smith and Jones, the iconic London landmark is once again intact.
This is, at first glance, a bit odd. But if you dig a little deeper, you’ll find that the show did in fact address the repairs, with an extremely missable detail in the interim invasion story The Christmas Invasion.
Like Aliens of London before it, The Christmas Invasion featured a sequence of a spaceship flying over the UK capital. And once again, London's landmarks featured prominently – including Big Ben.
If you look closely, you’ll notice that scaffolding has been CGI-d into these shots, as a nod to the damage dealt to the iconic clock tower in Aliens of London, and the work being done to return it to its former glory.
This also works as a nice metaphor for a country struggling to hold itself together in the face of alien invaders.
It’s also yet another example of Doctor Who predicting real-world events. Sure, Big Ben hasn’t had to contend with a spaceship crashing into it (yet), but it was clad in scaffolding between 2017 and 2021 so that routine restoration work could be completed!